(7 of 7)
"Can Do" or "Can't Do." In Nanking last week, the Gimo was busy too. His day began, as usual, at 6 a.m., when he rose, scrubbed his face with cold water, and stepped on to the verandah of his simple two-story brick residence for 20 minutes of setting-up exercises.
After that came prayers and reading; then breakfast alone and the day's work. When he had military visitors, he donned his plain, unmedaled khaki uniform; otherwise he wore a dark blue mandarin gown with a black jacket. To save coal, the grate in his study was left unlit most days, and the Gimo wore a skullcap to keep his head warm.
Much of his work was correspondence and official documents. He did not dictate the replies; he merely brushed one or two ideographs in the margin of each—"Can do" or "Can't do"—which gave his secretaries the clue for the answer. Lunch was Western style when foreign guests were present, Chinese style for his countrymen. He was usually abed by 10 p.m. and he was sleeping soundly, he said. The only insomnia he could remember recently was last March, when the surprise election of General Li Tsung-jen to the vice presidency had made him somewhat sleepless. He had cured that by violating one of his Methodist principles: he had downed a little bit of whiskey.
"A Man of War." Chiang Kai-shek is a man of principle, not an opportunist, not a warlord, not (his enemies finally admitted) a grafter. His principles, however, are not always clear or consistent. The conflict between the old and new, unresolved in China, is also unresolved in China's Chiang. He had been right so often, when those around him were wrong, that taking advice did not come easily to him. Three times—from Canton, from Sian, and from Chungking—he had fought his way out of hopeless situations. Such an experience might breed arrogance, and many believe that Chiang is arrogant, narrow, unimaginative—the victim of his own frozen will.
Yet a streak pf humility remains. He showed it recently when he and Madame Chiang, with sons Ching-kuo and Wei-kuo, went over to the Christian church which the Gimo had presented to Nanking. No pastor was present. The Gimo himself preached a little sermon, taking his text from I. Chronicles: "As for me, I had in mine heart to build an house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord . . . But God said unto me, Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war . . ." Jehovah had willed the assignment to Solomon. The Gimo derived the lesson: "Man proposes but God disposes."